Body Mass Nutrition

Ideally, you should fuel your body about 1 to 3 hours pre-workout, depending on how your body tolerates food. Experiment and see what time frame works best for your body. If you're a competitive athlete, this is something you need to explore during your training days and not during game day. Immediately after your workout, your muscles are depleted of the stored form of carbohydrate—glycogen—which fuels muscular contraction during lifting. Especially after a long, heavy training session, your body tips toward a catabolic (muscle-wasting) state.

To refill these stores after your workout and jumpstart the growth process (anabolism), you again want to rely on fast-digesting carbs (and their effect on insulin). Here, too, a fast-digesting protein like whey protein isolate can quickly shuttle into muscle cells alongside the sugar molecules. Research shows that after an intense weight workout you have a far greater need for dietary protein than sedentary individuals, and that pre-workout nutrition fast-digesting proteins should be consumed before and after training for optimal gains.

When your body digests food, it breaks it down into various types of molecules that your cells can use (amino acids, glucose, vitamins, minerals, and so forth). These molecules are absorbed through the walls of your small intestine into the bloodstream. Insulin is released as well and its job is to shuttle these molecules into cells for use.

Now, depending on how much you eat, your plasma (blood) insulin levels can remain elevated for several hours (anywhere from 3 – 6+), and when your body is in this “fed” state–when its insulin levels are elevated and its absorbing nutrients you’ve eaten–little-to-no fat burning occurs. This is because insulin blocks lipolysis (fat “mobilization’).

When your body finishes absorbing all the nutrients eaten, plasma insulin levels decrease to a low, “baseline” level, and research has shown that in this state, exercise-induced fat loss is accelerated. Weightlifting in a fasted state has proven to be particularly effective in this regard.

What you need is to deplete your glycogen stores and signal your body that it's under energy deficit. To grant maximum depletion of energy, you have to apply both nutritional and physical stress. Meaning: you need to intermittently fast and you need to exercise while fasting (intermittent fasting means one main meal per day). It's best to get your body hydrated before you even think about heading to the gym. One way to determine your overall hydration status is to check out the color of your urine first thing in the morning. Getting enough water after exercise depends on many factors, namely the length and intensity of the exercise, the environmental conditions, and your individual physiology. If you want to get all scientific about determining pre-workout nutrition you'll need to bust out that smart-phone calculator. Start by weighing yourself before and after exercise and recording both numbers. After your workout, drink 16-ounces of fluid for every pound you've lost. Do what feels right for your body. And as mentioned above, use your pee as a guideline for your overall hydration status.

Your body will perceive the energy deficit as a life threat that must be dealt with and it will compensate accordingly. This is how that works: as you intermittently fast and exercise, your glycogen stores are depleted in a rate which is substantially more rapid than fasting alone.